For today’s Flash Fiction, I’ve decided to participate in Chuck Wendig’s Random Photo Story Challenge.

Here are the three photos I chose for my inspiration: (Links because all are copywritten):

• Piano Apple by zakonslike
• Untitled by Leonardo Amaro Rodrigues 
• Closed Wings by yukiharu

White

She had been told, as a rookie, that there was always one unsolved case that stuck with you, the case that you never forgot, that you were never able to forgive yourself for failing to solve. The older cops, the retired cops at the bar, they said that no matter how long you worked with that hanging over your head, in the end, that case will be the reason that you quit.

It rained the day she came across hers. The weather was almost like the murderer had planned it to be so, like the sky cooperated to make everything look even more muted and grey.

The apartment the victim had been found in was one of those colorless modern numbers, all black and white, metal and glass and hard lines. It was the sort of pristine apartment where you can’t imagine anyone with mud on their boots, a dog on the sofa, toddlers running around, or any of those dirty things that inevitably come with living. It was too sterile for that, for anyone to actually live in. There hadn’t even been any food in the refrigerator.

The crime scene was as sterile as the rest of the place. Not a fingerprint to be found. The victim was naked, of course, but whatever she’d worn to get to that place had disappeared, everything except a silver bracelet around one wrist. She was beautiful and as pristine as the apartment, not a mark on her and nothing to mar her perfect skin. She lay there, white against steel grey sheets, her dark hair spread over the pillow like she was sleeping. There was no blood, no body fluids at all, not on the sheets and not anywhere else. The only two splashes of color in the apartment were the red of her lips and a single granny-smith apple sitting on the piano keys.

She always wondered after that why the murderer would leave that one apple in an apartment with no other food. It hadn’t even been tasted. No fingerprints. No saliva. Just a perfect apple, green against the black and white.  It didn’t make sense why it would be there.

Poison had been the murder weapon. That, the victim’s dark hair, her fair skin, and the apple, well, it always made her think of a fairy tale. They never identified the girl, and they never found any scrap of evidence to point to a suspect. A week after she had been found, the body disappeared from the morgue. The case was filed away – cold from the start.

When the detective retired, that was the one that she couldn’t forget.

As an old woman, she thought she saw the girl once, on the street with a handsome young man on her arm, but when she turned to watch them they were gone. There was only a small bearded man sitting on the street rattling a can. Coins for the poor?

She dropped a few quarters in the can and went on her way.

© 2012 – Jennifer L. Davis

If you haven’t stopped over yet, Chuck’s doing a quite interesting project celebrating the release of his new novel, Blackbirds. It’s a tumblog called “This is How You Die” where folks are submitting stories and artwork detailing their own deaths.  If you haven’t yet, go and submit your death today!

Let’s get that out of the way first of all. I am not a pirate, I am, in fact, a potential victim of piracy. However, SOPA and PIPA are not the way to go about protecting those copyrights.

Because see, here’s the thing… that First Amendment? Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press? Those things are important to me, more important than making sure some doofus doesn’t go about copying my work. For one thing, these bills won’t work. Like DRM, they will do more to punish the legitimate consumer than to stop piracy, and in the process they will break fundamental aspects of the internet, endanger internet security, destroy the entire DNS structure, and do all sorts of things that will make it impossible to do business on the internet.

The sponsors of this bill are big entertainment corporations. They don’t care about the little guy, they don’t care that this bill will make the very tools I use to publish and advertise the content I create impossible to use, and could very well put those networks out of business. Twitter, tumblr, Facebook, Youtube, etc. – anywhere that depends on user generated content – could be completely destroyed by this bill. That means nowhere to notify my fans of a new story, nowhere to advertise my current projects, nowhere to announce that I’ve gotten something else published.

My income from writing would go from a steady stream to a barely existent trickle.

The worst part of it is, the thing that should make all freedom-loving Americans sit up and pay attention, is that this bill would make censorship even easier. Already, people have learned that they can have content they don’t like taken down by submitting a false report of copyright infringement. They don’t need proof. They just need to submit the report. With this bill, it wouldn’t just take down one small piece of content –  they could destroy entire websites, freeze funds, stop someone’s only source of income, even put them in prison for up to five years  –  just from one report of infringement.

Censorship. Someone being silenced just because of an unpopular opinion. Sounds like the Great Firewall of China, doesn’t it?

Yeah, that’s exactly what it is, and it’s here in the USA, unless we stop it.

– Jennifer L. Davis
Please see below for more information:

(more…)

I was a Girl Scout, once upon a time, and I have always been extremely proud of the Girl Scouts continuing moves to support equality and open-mindedness. Unlike Boy Scouts, which has banned participation of anyone who doesn’t fit into their narrow and bigoted world view, the Girl Scouts have actively supported inclusiveness of all girls and diversity among their membership, no matter what, and have done so from the very beginning of the organization. However, the Girl Scouts are now under attack for the very same supportive and welcoming policies that I have always praised, and from one of their own.

A Girl Scout is calling for a boycott of Girl Scout cookies in a youtube video. Why? Because Girl Scouts allows transgirls to join and participate. (Update: Looks like the Hate-Mongering Girl Scout has now set her video to private. Maybe she learned a bit of a lesson here?)

Here’s the thing. The Girl Scout Mission? This is it:

Girl Scouting builds girls of courage, confidence and character, who make the world a better place.

And the girl in this video? She’s not making the world a better place, she’s spreading hate and bigotry and has become one of those people ensuring that the world is a more dangerous place for transwomen.  And all you have to do is read the news to know how dangerous a place it already is.  And here she is, wanting to stop one of the sources of income for an organization that has become one of the few safe places out there for a transgirl. For that, honestly, I think she should be the one banned from participating in the Girl Scouts.

Girl Scouts is all about empowering girls and turning them into strong, independent women. It’s just the sort of confidence-boosting organization and help that a girl in a particularly difficult situation might need.  Allowing transgirls to join and participate could very well save lives, by giving that child a community where she is welcomed and included.

So here’s what I propose: Let that boycott proposal have the opposite result, and let the GLBT community and our friends come out to support this organization that has been so supportive of us. So here’s the plan:

Buy All The Cookies.

I’m trying to eat healthier, but I’ll buy boxes as gifts and give them away all over the place if I have to. (While reserving one box of my favorite, Thin Mints, to stick in the freezer at home, of course.) I’ll buy what I can afford and do whatever I can to help.

To find a place where you can buy cookies, just go here: http://www.girlscoutcookies.org/ and they’ll give you the nearest cookie station, or alternatively you can contact your local Girl Scout Council to find out how to contact and help your local troop or how to donate, if you don’t want to buy cookies.

Help them out. They deserve it.

Pinkie Pie from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic

Sometimes it seems like I’m a completely different person when communicating with written text instead of verbal. I can be downright witty, as long as it’s in writing. However, it’s often difficult to get me to say anything at all.

This can lead to a bit of a disconnect between people who know me and my voice primarily through text and those who know me primarily through verbal conversation. My best cyber-friend, for instance, once expressed surprise when I described myself as almost paralytically shy.

Well, I am. I feel more confident with the written word no matter what language I am communicating in – this leads me to tell people that I can read and write in five languages, but I can barely speak one.  My wit, whether verbal or written, can vary from dry and sarcastic to downright silly, but either way, I feel more comfortable letting it out in the written word.

I’ve written a lot of serious fiction. I’ve also written quite a bit of humorous fiction, and I prefer to mix comedy into my drama and drama into my comedy.  There is a reason why my current and most-likely-to-be-finalized novel is a satire. When given the right characters to channel it, I have found that apparently my pen can be very funny indeed. It’s all about confidence and where comfort lies – when and where you are more comfortable, it is easier to let certain aspects of yourself out to play.

Humor isn’t, of course, the only thing I feel more comfortable expressing in print.  To be honest, I feel more comfortable expressing almost everything in print, humor just happens to be the thing that other people notice most of all. I’m always surprised when I am told that something I’ve written made someone laugh because I almost never make anyone laugh outside of it. Well . . . except, perhaps, when I run into the wall or trip over my own feet, which has a disturbing tendency to happen on a regular basis.

Do any of you have voices that you feel only get let out to play when you’re writing, that almost never get expressed anywhere else?

The majority of my paid freelance work tends to be copy-editing or copy-writing, which allows for little opportunity for creativity.  The rest of my published work consists almost entirely of short stories or non-fiction articles. I aspire to be a novel writer, yes, but this writer has to eat, and the best way to do so on a regular basis is still short form work.

I hear a lot of writers out there complaining that they can’t write short fiction, that the only thing that feels natural to them is long-form prose. I used to feel the same way, particularly when I was in school, and before selling a story meant the difference between living off of cereal for a month or eating actual food for more than one night a week.

There’s nothing like unpaid bills and an aching bank account for making a writer productive, and breaking their illusions about what they’re willing or able to be paid to write.  And I’m here to tell you that if you can write a novel, you can write a short story.  The trick, of course, is not letting your characters get off track and keeping the plot to one straight path.

Writing can be a lot like braiding hair. A novel might be more like an elaborate and intricate braided bun, consisting of a dozen or more strands woven together and branching in or out and looping around. The trick in this, of course, is to make sure that in your weaving you keep the braids tight, weave in your ends, make sure nothing is introduced that doesn’t come together with the rest and find resolution somewhere – it all needs to get tucked in.  Detail and intricacy are welcome in a novel.

In a short story, sometimes the most meaningful parts of the story are in what doesn’t appear on the page. The short story author must be content to leave stuff out and trust in the reader to understand what is left out, and what it means.  Instead of an elaborate braided updo, you might have just a simple fishtail braid – or not even that – it may just be a ponytail.

With a short story, you rely on your readers to fill in the blanks of what comes before and what comes after in your characters’ lives.  It can be amazing, sometimes, the amount of meaning and detail that can be achieved by leaving things out. Sometimes very important things.  Hemingway, one of the true masters of short fiction, almost always left the most important parts of his stories completely out of the text. The story “Hills like White Elephants”, for instance, is about a couple facing abortion and yet neither abortion nor pregnancy are mentioned in the story at all.

He made his point with the story, and he made it while leaving everything the story was about unmentioned and barely even referenced. It is also a tale told in dialogue with little action or real plot, but this makes the story no less meaningful. As a story, it’s like a kick in the gut. A particularly sharp one.

This seems to be a common thread among many of the best short stories, whether literary in nature or otherwise. They are defined not by what is written in the actual text but by what appears in the negative space around it. It is the purest distillation of what a story can be, and writing short stories can often lead to tighter writing in novels. Practicing the one will always make the other better.